Transcribing

Transcribers of Reddit

I'd like to introduce you to the Grafeas Group, a small 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation that ran r/TranscribersOfReddit, an accessibility initiative to transcribe audio, image and video posts on Reddit for the benefit of people who with visual or hearing impairments, slow internet, inconsistency of rendering across Reddit's various official and third-party clients, and more. To help these people, the posts were transcribed into the comments, where they could be accessed either by simply reading, or where necessary, by assistive technology such as screen readers.

I transcribed with the Grafeas Group for almost exactly three years, from the 20th of June, 2020, to the 30th of June, 2023. I helped moderate the subreddit and Discord since February 2021, and I'm still helping with the Discord. I've even used a few transcriptions myself in the past when the contrast between the text and the background of images didn't suit my colour vision (I have protanomaly).

Sadly, developments on Reddit forced Transcribers of Reddit to shut down. Most of our last posts were transcribed on the 30th of June, 2023, with the very last one finished at 00:48 AM UTC+0 on the 1st of July. You can read more about why this happened on our announcement post. It's many of the same reasons why I decided to move away from Reddit as a user.

Transcribers Elsewhere

The Grafeas Group does not have plans for another project. Transcribers of Reddit has shut down and the group is a non-profit without a project, and we don't see that changing. We don't have the resources or the energy to start anything new. Our Discord remains open, but that's it for the most part. Inevitably, however, some of our users have moved to Lemmy, myself included, and there is still a place for transcriptions there.

Although the Transcribers of Reddit and Grafeas Group don't operate on Lemmy, there are a number of our community members and people who knew about our work but never joined us who are now transcribing there. I'm one of those people, though the number of transcriptions I do is far less than those I did on Reddit. I'm still getting my footing on Lemmy. This post on programmer_humor@programming.dev is evidence of that.

And although we've shut down, our subreddit is still visible. Our templates are tailored to Reddit, but we're working on getting up a resource that's more universally usable. We've deloped a lot of assets over the years that could be useful to people, and we want to share those. In the mean time, you can head over to our wiki if you're interested in how we did things.